Therapeutic Therapy
by Anysia
Summary: After a two month separation, an estranged Ash and Misty decide to get couples' counseling.


**_Therapeutic Therapy_**

****

Summary: After a two-month separation, an estranged Ash and Misty decide to get couple's counseling.

A/N: Man, I am in the middle of _such _an intense writer's block for the sequel to "To Arms!" (which I've finally titled "Temporary Cease-Fire"). I mean, I've got about half of the first chapter done, and then I just blank out. So in a vain attempt to break through this damned block, I keep writing little vignettes. It's settling into a case of comforting predictability, I s'pose.

Also, I stole the title of this fic from a sign near my house; such a redundant phrase further proves that Southern New Jersey is filled to the brim with families sharing a single brain cell.

My apologies if this premise has been used before; I haven't seen it done, but knowing my luck, it has, and I'll be viciously flamed by an eleven-year-old who types with Caps Lock on. 

Disclaimer: Pokemon belongs to Nintendo, Game Freak, 4Kids, and probably some other people I'm forgetting. In any case, it's not mine.

Story Dedicated to: All the therapists over the years that my mother has forcibly dragged me to; your incompetence and ineptness at deciphering the simplest psychological "anomalies" is the inspiration for this story.

**_Ash—20, Misty—22_**

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"Remind me again why we're here."

Misty Waterflower sighed as she set down the magazine she had been reading, shooting an annoyed glance at her estranged boyfriend, Ash Ketchum. "Because unless we go through with this, there's a good chance that we'll break up for good this time," she said frankly, crossing her arms across her chest and shifting into a slightly more comfortable position in the unyielding waiting room chair. "We have problems we have to work through, and this is the most practical method."

Ash frowned a little at her tone; Misty had once again taken to speaking to him as if he were a small child, and that condescending voice never failed to infuriate him. That and her bossy attitude, _horrible temper, and complete inability to ever admit that she was wrong…_

"Ketchum and Waterflower?" a man dressed in a grey three-piece suit called in a bland voice as he stepped into the waiting room. "Come on back to my office."

Ash and Misty shared a terse smile as they followed the man down a long corridor and into a bright, cheerful office. There was a pastel sofa against the far wall, a large abstract watercolor print above it. Ferns and bouquets of flowers added to the room's vivacity and upbeat atmosphere.

It was just too much cheerfulness for one man to take.

"How long is this going to take?" Ash asked irritably, sitting down heavily on the sofa. 

"Mr. Ketchum," the man informed him, "you cannot possibly attempt to clock the recovery of a relationship."

"Yeah, _Ash_," Misty said snidely, taking a seat next to him. "Dr. Kegel is taking time out of his busy schedule to see us, so just shut up and pay attention."

"Now, why don't we get down to business?" Dr. Kegel asked in a flat voice as he settled into his richly-upholstered armchair and clasping his hands in his lap. "Miss Waterflower, why do you feel that Ash is taking you for granted?"

"You think that I'm taking you for granted?" Ash asked incredulously, regarding the young woman next to him with an air of disbelief. "Since when?"

"Well, doctor," Misty said matter-of-factly, ignoring Ash's wide-eyed shock, "ever since Ash here won the Championships and became an official Pokemon Master, he's done nothing but work and battle. He's hardly ever home…"

"Do you know how much _work _my job entails?! The paperwork alone can take five hours!"

"…never helps out around the house anymore…"

"Now that's just not true! When have I _ever helped out around the house?"_

"…and our sex life has all but completely disappeared…"

"Okay, that's it!" Ash yelled, quickly getting up from the couch and striding angrily across the room. "I am not having this conversation!"

"Mr. Ketchum, I sense that you're feeling quite a bit of anger and frustration with your significant other," Dr. Kegel observed, thoughtfully stroking his goatee.

"Oh, _brilliant _deduction!" Ash said sarcastically, leaning against the wall and rolling his eyes. "Did the _plant _help you figure that one out?" he asked, nudging the potted rubber plant by the door with his foot.

"Ash, stop being an ass and sit down!" Misty hissed to him.

"Oh, I'm sorry, Miss _Queen of the Universe!_ How stupid of me to attempt to defy your orders!"

"You are such an idiot!"

"And you're a bossy bitch!"

"Very good," Dr. Kegel interrupted their shouting match, his voice pattern unchanged from its original montone. "Now, Mr. Ketchum, would you care to tell us why _you feel that your relationship with Miss Waterflower is currently rather…shaky?"_

"She has a really bad temper, she treats me like a little kid, and she's overly-controlling," Ash said frankly, ticking off the traits on his fingers. "Anything else you want to know?"

"Not really," the doctor said. He paused for a moment then asked, "But Mr. Ketchum, you've just shown us that you exhibit the exact same negative attributes as you have grown weary of within Miss Waterflower. Couldn't your exasperation with these traits be seen as a double standard?"

"Uh…maybe?" Ash responded carefully. 

Misty pressed a hand to her forehead and sighed. "He _means, is it really fair for you to get mad at me for having a bad temper and everything when you do the exact same things?"_

"I've never hit you over the head with a mallet."

"That's not the point."

"Then _what_, pray tell, _is _the goddamned point? Why are we here again?"

"To try and fix our relationship!" Misty cried out in exasperation. "But you're really making this harder than it has to be!"

"At least I don't going around telling people about our _sex life!" Ash yelled, coming nose-to-nose with her._

"What's to tell?" Misty countered. 

"ARRGH!" 

Dr. Kegel turned his sleepy-eyed countenance to the wall-clock, then announced, "You're making great progress. Let's move on, shall we?"

----------

"I think," the doctor said thoughtfully, pacing back and forth with one hand in his pocket and the other continuing to stroke his goatee, "that one of the main problems with your relationship may be found in your inability to communicate with one another in a civilized fashion. Both of you have very aggressive personalities, and this naturally leads to clashes and power struggles. I believe that this may help. Misty, why don't you go first?"

"Okay. This—" Misty held up the small dry-erase board that the doctor had handed to her, "—is Ash, the Psychotic Pokemon Trainer." Drawn on the board was a crude rendering of a boxer-shorts-clad Ash, still wearing his Pokemon League hat and green fingerless gloves. Upon his face was a cocky smirk, and one arm was extended, the fingers in the 'V' for victory pose. Using the marker as a pointer, she said, "Note the sloping Neanderthal forehead, a clear indication of his slight intelligence. He is wearing Pikachu boxer shorts, so that he can be as physically close to his Pokemon without actually strapping them to his body—a scenario that is actually quite likely to become reality in the coming years. Ash's face is permanently set in that stupidly egotistical smirk that has sent many people into murderous rages and causes them to attempt to kill the idiotic young trainer." She set the board down and looked expectantly at Ash.

He tried; oh, how he tried. But he just couldn't keep that infamous smirk off his face. "Ya know, Mist," he said slowly, "I really thought that I had been too harsh when Dr. Kegel said to draw our interpretation of each other. But now I think we're even." He flipped over his board and proudly held it out for Misty and the psychiatrist to see.

"Uh…" the joint response came.

"What do you mean, 'uh…'?" Ash asked quizzically. "See how her head is completely filled with water? The vacant stare? The vaguely offensive footnotes on her disturbing obsession with tentacle-y Pokemon?"

"Uh, Ash…almost the entire thing got wiped away," Misty noted, tapping the white surface with her index finger.

"_What?_" he cried, turning the board back into his line of vision. Sure enough, all that remained of his wicked drawing of Misty were a bunch of dark blue swipes. "How could this have happened?!" He looked down into his lap and, upon observing the deep-blue ink stains settling into his khakis, mentally cursed himself for being stupid enough to have rested the dry-erase board in his lap while Misty explained her drawing. 

"It's alright, Mr. Ketchum," Dr. Kegel said sympathetically—well, as sympathetically as a monotone can possibly sound. "We can wait while you draw another one."

"Um, okay…" Ash said awkwardly, quickly scribbling something down upon the board and then turning it to face them. "See, uh, here's Misty—" He pointed to the hastily-drawn stick figure. "—and, uh, there's flames coming out of her head. 'Cause she's always mad." He sat the board next to him on the couch and leaned back, blushing deeply. 

Two pairs of eyes stared at him questioningly. "That's it? I guess I got off easy," Misty remarked, smiling infuriatingly at him.

Ash just scowled and blushed a darker shade of red.

"So how are you two feeling about your relationship now?" Dr. Kegel asked them. 

Ash and Misty turned to look at each other, then simultaneously stuck their tongues out.

----------

Two sets of word associations, five inkblots, and countless shouting matches later, Ash and Misty sat as far apart as possible on the small pastel-colored sofa, staring angrily in opposite directions. Dr. Kegel's exercises in "truth-building" had done nothing to improve their relationship nor help their attitudes; rather, it had resulted in mutual mudslinging and several off-color statements about each other's sexual performance that had resulted in Misty giving Ash a black eye, which he was now nursing with a wet cloth. 

"Well," Dr Kegel said after a long stretch of silence, "I've come to a conclusion."

"If it's anything like your other conclusions, I doubt it's going to be very beneficial for us," Ash said angrily, wincing as he felt another stab of pain shoot through his left eye. 

"It's quite simple, actually," the psychiatrist said, flipping through the pages of notes he had made throughout the session. "You are obviously not meant to be together; such strong personalities cannot be equal partners in a relationship. One person must submit or back down, and since neither of you seem willing to do so, I'd recommend calling it quits."

"What?!" Ash cried, springing to his feet at the same time as an equally-surprised Misty. 

"From what I've seen today, you and Miss Waterflower are completely incompatible," Dr. Kegel said frankly, setting down his notebook and clasping his hands in his lap. "How you've been able to stay together this long is beyond me."

Ash was all set to begin screaming obscenities, to tell this nutcase that there was no way that he could possibly know anything about Misty and him, that if he'd bothered to pay any attention at all in the last hour he'd realize how much they meant to each other, despite all the yelling and screaming, when…

"Wait just a damn minute!" Misty said angrily, fire in her eyes. "Dr. Kegel, we came here under the impression that you could help bring us back together after we'd been separated for over two months, barely even speaking. But from the second we came in, you seemed positively bored with the whole thing. You've barely paid any attention to what just might be going on, but if you _had_, you'd realize that despite how badly we treat one another, we really do love each other!"

"That's right!" Ash interjected.

"Shut up, Ash, I'm talking!" Misty yelled back.

"Sorry…"

"The bottom line is, Ash and I have been fighting and yelling and beating up on each other for ten years, and we're _still together, and nothing you can say or do will change that!" she said with great finality. "What do you have to say to that?"_

Dr. Kegel looked at her evenly, then shrugged. "I still get paid two hundred dollars for the hour either way; what do I care?"

Misty let out a frustrated shriek, then grabbed a handful of bills from her pocketbook and tossed it at him. "Here! Buy yourself a better suit!" she yelled angrily, then grabbed Ash by the hand and led him out of the office.

---------

"I'm sorry I dragged you to that idiotic 'couples' therapy'," Misty apologized for the hundredth time as she and Ash cuddled on the couch later that evening. 

"Hey, it brought us back together; that's all that matters," Ash noted, quickly kissing her before heading into the kitchen to refresh his drink. 

"A dozen roses and a moonlit serenade would have done the same thing of course," Misty called into the kitchen.

"Fine; next time we have a fight, we'll make up through that classic guitar-serenade up to the balcony scene."

"Sounds good."

"You know how to play the guitar, right?" 

Misty laughed and threw a pillow at him as he returned to the living room. "Jerk," she said affectionately as he embraced her. "How's that eye, anyway?"

"It'll heal…eventually. You've got a mean right, Mist."

"Yeah, but you knew that already."

"Trust me; I've got more scars from you than anything else."

They leaned in for a kiss but stopped as the vid-phone's shrill announcement of an incoming call interrupted the moment. "I'll get it," Ash said in a slightly irritated voice. "Hello?" 

"Hey, Ash, you're back livin' with Misty?" a voice asked as the video kicked in, revealing everyone's favorite squinty-eyed Pokemon breeder.

"Yeah, we've made up…again." 

"So, I guess that couples' therapy worked out pretty well after all, huh?"

"Brock? Do me a favor; never mention the word 'therapy' again as long as I live, okay?"

"That bad, huh?"

"You don't know the half of it."

Brock chuckled to himself at the disgusted expression on Ash's face; he was dying to know the details of his two best friends' foray into therapy-land, but Ash's look at the mention of the experience made him think that he'd be better off waiting for awhile. "So things are back to normal with you two?"

"Well, as normal as—_Misty!_" Ash turned away from the vid-phone to see Misty loudly slurping away the last few drops of his raspberry iced tea. "That was the last one in the house! It even had a lemon wedge in it!"

Misty smiled at him. "And it was _really good."_

"_MISTY!_" Ash yelled angrily. "I'm gonna kill you!" He rushed away from the phone, accidentally hanging up on Brock in the process. 

"Bring it on, _Ashy-boy!_" Misty taunted, leaping over the sofa and running into the bedroom.

Ash stopped momentarily in the middle of the living room. "God, how I've missed this," he remarked to no one in particular, then resumed the chase.

----------

Brock laughed as the screen went blank. "Ah, young love…"

|END|

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_Say it with me, everyone: "Anysia writes **way **too many 'Romance/Humor' fics." But they're so **fun! As someone who has spent a lot of time in therapy due to an overzealous mother thinking sarcasm and cynicism are abnormal in a seventeen-year-old girl (hey, I'm from a small town…there's not much else to do), this fic was even moreso, as it basically lampoons every psychiatrist I've ever been forced to see (Dr. Kegel is named after the one whom I particularly hated; I just changed the spelling a bit). **_

_I was actually inspired to write this while attempting to fall asleep at one in the morning last night/this morning, and I had SAT's to take at eight o'clock, **despite the fact that I already got a 1300 and was being forced to take them for scholarship money *grits teeth at annoyance over SAT's*. Anyway, I wondered what the possible result would be of Ash and Misty in couple's counseling. It was just a very attractive premise to me.**_

_Reviews greatly appreciated; thank you very much to everyone who has taken the time to review my other stories! I love you all! _


End file.
